I see that this issue was discussed before, but the description still doesn't explicitly state the required resulting order of states within a row. It's easy to guess after analyzing a couple of failed attempts, but I suppose that's not the point?

Learned something new!

I like your attitude towards grumpy people!

All you had to do was ask yourself: "What quarter of 12 is the month?" and write it in the language of math. :)

A clever way to get the positions with minimal space complexity. Too bad that one has to go for O(n^2) time complexity to achieve that.

Enjoyable challenge!

I wish I didn't have to go through all the trial and error to figure out what should happen in case string length > max length && max length <= 3. :/

If it's a well-known mathematical formula (like searching 'digital root' shows), there's nothing wrong with using it in production.

As for the upvotes, anyone can vote here and most votes come from people who don't have the knowledge to tell good from bad practice so they don't have much merit anyway.